TRANSPARENCY

OUR VPN AND PROXY SERVERS

When you use a proxy service or VPN, all your internet traffic
flows through your VPN provider (us). This is a big responsibility,
and we take it seriously.

Our VPN servers do not maintain a log of the sites or IP addresses
you connect to. We have no "browsing history"
on you.

The servers record high-level
data about bit transfer totals for purposes of bandwidth
accounting and server abuse detection. This data is non-specific
in nature and not useful for user activity profiling or analysis.

OUR WEBSITE

Our website does what it needs to do by doing as little as possible.
It's 100% functional even if you turn off cookies.
If you can read HTML/CSS/JS, check out the source code. We don't
obfuscate anything.

Our site uses no third-party APIs. We bring in fonts from Adobe
and the GA script from Google, and the rest is internal.

Our web server runs apache and does standard COMBINED and ERROR style
logging. We make no attempt at doing cross-site tracking on our
visitors.

We place one cookie: our Google Analytics tag.

ORDERS AND CUSTOMER DATA

Credit card orders are managed by our internal web server. They
are sent securely to Chase for processing via a direct encrypted
link. There is no middle-man payment processor—we communicate
directly with Chase. Credit card orders from us will show up on
your statement with a name containing "RAYNERSW".

PayPal orders are processed with PayPal's Checkout 2.0 API.

Software registration codes are stored in an internal database
along with the purchaser's name, email, date of purchase, order
history, and subscription parameters. This database is physically
located on a dedicated server owned by Rayner Software in a
secure Hurricane Electric datacenter in Fremont, California.

We keep track of user accounts' hit count, as well as most recent
hit. This is for the purpose of identifying DDoS attacks and
similar abuse.

DMCA NOTICES & BAIT TORRENTS

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act is a law requiring hosts
of unauthorized copyrighted content to remove it from their servers.
This law was designed to thwart piracy websites and torrents.

Like all VPN providers, we receive a number of automated
DMCA takedown
notices from bait torrent hosts. These come in when a user of our
service inadvertently "takes the bait" from a copyright
enforcement company. These notices make the false claim that the
VPN provider is hosting the torrent in question, which is
inaccurate. Because the DMCA notices are not relevant to VPN
providers, most of the server companies we work with ignore
or simply forward these notices to us.

Bait torrents are an interesting (OK that might be too strong a word) topic which isn't very
well-documented on the Internet. We've written up some
tidbits from our experience with them over the years: Learn more about DMCA bait

GOVERNANCE

NetShade has no affiliation with any foreign or domestic
government entities, nor any external corporate interests or
stakeholders. NetShade is developed and run by Rayner
Software in California, USA, and is bound by and served by the
laws and constitution of the United States of America.

To date we have not received a “National Security Letter,” or any
other legal instrument which imposes a gag order upon the
recipient.

SERVER SECURITY

All our servers are either dedicated servers leased by Rayner
Software, or datacenter colo servers owned by Rayner Software.
We do not run any services on shared or cloud hosting.

Our servers run CentOS 7 or 8, and are kept up to date. We're proud
to say that as far as we know, none of our servers has ever been
compromised. Only two incidents have occurred since we started NetShade: a brief, non-invasive
attack coming from the SweetCaptcha widget on our site in 2015,
and an SQL display bug in 2019. Neither of these caused any data
to be leaked or breeched.
Any future security incidents will be posted on
this page and tweeted as soon as they are identified.

SECURITY INCIDENTS TIMELINE

LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTIONS

Some VPNs offer lifetime subscriptions. We're wary of these, for one simple reason:
VPNs use plenty of bandwidth, and bandwidth isn't cheap. If we were to offer
a lifetime subscription and sign up a large number of new users, it's hard to imagine how we
could continue hosting those users' bandwidth 5, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road without any
new revenue from them. If someone offers a lifetime subscription, it seems likely that they
plan to either up-sell you somehow down the road, let the servers become bogged and slow, or
simply pack up and disappear. We've been around for
16 years and counting because we don't do things like that.

We do offer a lifetime subscription for KeyShade because it's just
a password app, and its sync uses little bandwidth.

OUR BUSINESS

Rayner Software is incorporated as an LLC in the state of California.
Our address is 1042 Country Club Dr, Suite 2A, Moraga CA 94556. We
can be reached at support@raynersw.com . The founder and owner,
Tyler Rayner can be reached directly at tcr.direct@raynersw.com or 408-406-5613 .
(Please use this contact sparingly- he's probably busy writing software).

STATEMENTS

We believe in doing business ethically and treating customers well

We believe in the user's right to privacy on the Internet

We are a software company first, and a VPN provider second

We love Objective-C, Cocoa, PHP and PostgreSQL

We are Mac people

We avoid using third-party libraries in our code whenever possible

We oppose all forms of cross-website tracking

We oppose piracy of software, movies, audio, or any other copyrighted material